Post by Alric on Jul 15, 2011 1:36:54 GMT -4
I've been doing a lot of online pottery research in the past few days, and I've had a hard time tracking down much information on a specific style of pot. There's just not much written on it in English. So I did a trick that I've found to be generally successful with anything Northern European: I searched for it in German on www.google.de. Instant success, I found many more resources that never made it into any of the English google results.
You don't have to be fluent in German (or Swedish, Norwegian, etc) to make this work, you just have to know how to translate the right key terms to get search results. If you don't know the languages well enough to know this term right away (for my pitcher it was easy, as the German for 'ceramic' is 'keramic'), you can go to translate.google.com and translate your English search term into the language you want to search in. It will give you multiple results - try each of those until you find the one that works best. You can also try to find the key terms in general pages like foreign language wikipedia articles (if you know enough of the language to figure out which terms are the ones you want - google translate can help here, too).
For reference, here's my English search results for 'tating ware' (a type of 8-9th c. widely traded luxury pottery that I'm trying to replicate):
www.google.com/search?q=tating%20ware&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi&biw=1024&bih=490
And here are the German results ('tatinger ware' - I learned the term from a German website with more general information on pottery styles that I translated via Google because I was lazy; when I found the phrase I wanted, 'tating ware,' I grabbed the original text in German and found the German phrase to search for):
www.google.de/search?um=1&hl=de&biw=1024&bih=453&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=tatinger+ware&oq=tatinger+ware&aq=f&aqi=&aql=1&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=29692l33132l0l33307l19l16l0l7l7l0l235l1542l2-7l9
The difference in the quality of the search results speaks for itself (the first half dozen German results are EXACTLY what I'd wanted to find in English, and couldn't). Northern European people often have cooler websites than English speakers!
You don't have to be fluent in German (or Swedish, Norwegian, etc) to make this work, you just have to know how to translate the right key terms to get search results. If you don't know the languages well enough to know this term right away (for my pitcher it was easy, as the German for 'ceramic' is 'keramic'), you can go to translate.google.com and translate your English search term into the language you want to search in. It will give you multiple results - try each of those until you find the one that works best. You can also try to find the key terms in general pages like foreign language wikipedia articles (if you know enough of the language to figure out which terms are the ones you want - google translate can help here, too).
For reference, here's my English search results for 'tating ware' (a type of 8-9th c. widely traded luxury pottery that I'm trying to replicate):
www.google.com/search?q=tating%20ware&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi&biw=1024&bih=490
And here are the German results ('tatinger ware' - I learned the term from a German website with more general information on pottery styles that I translated via Google because I was lazy; when I found the phrase I wanted, 'tating ware,' I grabbed the original text in German and found the German phrase to search for):
www.google.de/search?um=1&hl=de&biw=1024&bih=453&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=tatinger+ware&oq=tatinger+ware&aq=f&aqi=&aql=1&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=29692l33132l0l33307l19l16l0l7l7l0l235l1542l2-7l9
The difference in the quality of the search results speaks for itself (the first half dozen German results are EXACTLY what I'd wanted to find in English, and couldn't). Northern European people often have cooler websites than English speakers!
